Goldman Is Allowing Its Clients To Bet On The Next Financial Crisis

Just over a decade ago, as the S&P was hitting all time highs and there was a line around the block of 30-some year old hedge fund managers, desperate to put other people's money in various ultra risky investments just so they could pick a few excess bps of yield over Treasurys - a situation painfully familiar to what is going on now - Goldman had an epiphany: create new synthetic products that have huge convexity, i.e., provide little upside (such as a few basis points pick up in yield) versus unlimited downside, link them to the shittiest assets possible and sell them to gullible, yield-chasing idiots (collecting a transaction fee) while taking the other side of the trade (collecting a huge profit once everything crashes). The instruments, of course, were CDOs, and not long after Goldman sold a whole of them, the financial system crashed and needed a multi-trillion bailout from which the world has not recovered since.

Ten years later, Goldman is doing it again, only instead of targeting subprime mortgages, this time the bank has focused on quasi-insolvent European banks.

And just like right before the last financial crash, Goldman is once again allowing its clients to profit from the upcoming collapse, or as Bloomberg puts it, "less than a decade after the last major banking crisis, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan are offering investors a new way to bet on the next one."

The trade in question is a total return swap, a highly levered product which is similar or a credit default swap but has some nuanced differences, which targets what are known as Tier 1 , or AT1 or "buffer" notes issued by European banks, and which usually are the first to get wiped out when there is even a modest insolvency event (just ask Banco Popular), let alone a full blown financial crisis.

Goldman and JPM are offering the derivative trades that enable investors to bet on or against high-risk bank bonds that financial regulators can wipe out if a lender runs into trouble. Other banks are also hoping to get in on the fun, and start making markets in the contracts, known as total-return swaps, or TRS, in the coming weeks, according to Max Ruscher, the London-based director of credit indexes at IHS Markit Ltd., which administers the benchmarks that the swaps are linked to.

Why now? Bloomberg explains:

At a time when financial markets are racing from one high to another, and even the new Nobel laureate in economics is wondering aloud about investor behavior, the development is at once a sign of the headlong global race for investment returns and nagging worries that the investors may be getting ahead of themselves.

Just like with CDS, the security underlying these trades is debt, in this case what is known as additional Tier 1 notes, or AT1s, which banks started issuing after the European debt crisis. Since they were created to protect taxpayers from bearing the cost of government bailouts - and are therefore the first instrument to get bailed in (usually alongside the equity) - they pay generously high yields. And just like CDOs ten years ago, in today's era of near-zero interest rates, they’ve become sought after by debt investors around the world, ballooning into a $150 billion market: according to BofA index data, the average yield on AT1 debt is about 4.8%, around 10 times that for senior bank bonds.

To be sure, it's not just yield-chasing fanatics: as shown in the chart below...

The good news for Goldman is that whether for hedging or prop trading, the TRS is in great demand:

“Some participants are looking to get exposure to an asset class while others are hedging their positions,” according to a report on IHS Markit’s website. “On one side of the TRS trade, the index buyer anticipates that the total return of the index will rise. The index seller on the other side takes the opposite view.”

But if all the TRS does is payoff in the event of a technical default, why not just buy CDS to hedge AT1 exposure (or simpy to naked short)? The answer is that unlike with conventional trigger events, banks can skip coupon payments on the bonds without triggering a CDS default.

So they needed something new, and that's where Goldman's TRS emerged. As for the similarities to CDS, total-return swaps allow investors to hedge a single name or a basket of AT1s, and traders can make amplified gains - or potentially outsized losses - without having to own the underlying notes or tie up large amounts of collateral.

The good news - for Goldman clients - is that they can now start putting on a very, very cheap hedge with almost no negative carry ahead of the next financial crisis. And just like before the last financial crisis, Goldman is delighted to make the markets, in this case in swaps tied to an iBoxx index of dollar-denominated bank-capital notes and a gauge of similar euro bonds. The two indexes include AT1s issued by lenders such as Banco Santander SA, Deutsche Bank AG and HSBC Holdings Plc. In other words, anyone who shorts the product will make out like a bandit should some of Europe's biggest banks suffere an "unexpected" financial crisis.

Just like Lehman.

Explaining the need for the TRS, Manav Gupta, Goldman’s co-head of European credit flow trading, who confirmed to Bloomberg the bank is making markets for the trades said that the swaps on bank-capital note indexes “will be a very useful addition to the toolkit that our clients use in managing risk and taking broad-based exposure to the AT1 market.” Similarly, a spokesman for JPM also confirmed the bank is offering swaps on iBoxx indexes. Other have also jumped on board: Deutsche Bank started trading total-return swaps referencing Bloomberg Barclays indexes last month and plans to trade on iBoxx gauges, a spokesman said. Which is ironic: the biggest payoff to the TRS would come if Deutsche Bank suffers another liquidity, or solvency, event and its AT1s get wiped out.

Which begs the question: will vindictive Deutsche Bank traders bet the bank, so to speak, that their bank will be the next to tank? Of course, if they are right, there will be no middle or back office to collect the funds.

As for everyone else, now that both Goldman and JPM have once again announced it is "open season" for hunting banks, you may want to keep a close eye on unexpected risk-flaring episodes, first out of European banks and then everywhere else.

“Goldman had an epiphany: create new synthetic products that have huge convexity, i.e., provide little upside (such as a few basis points pick up in yield) versus unlimited downside, link them to the shittiest assets possible and sell them to gullible, yield-chasing idiots (collecting a transaction fee) while taking the other side of the trade (collecting a huge profit once everything crashes).”

That’s not what Collateralized Debt Obligations are or how they work and they don’t have unlimited downside.

They did it during the last one and alot of people now know about it and they want in for this next one.Soon the sheep will accept 10 year crashes as normal and they can schedule them at shorter intervals.

If cryptocurrency overtakes fiat, what will happen to these elaborate, domino-stack schemes? Programmers control crypto. Will they emulate these guys, always trying to get one over on the unsuspecting public?

GREAT! I'M BETTING THAT THE NEXT FINANCIAL CRISIS WILL BE AT THE DNC!David Brock' s left wing Media Matters, American Bridge 21st Century Foundation, and American Bridge 21st Century PAC are under suspicion of fraud for employee pay and shifting anonymous donors money from the foundation not legally required to disclose contributors, over to the PAC which is required to disclose donors. These group-think, cult organizations dominating the narrative on the left and the right have destroyed both political parties and turned the parties into extremist fringe political wing nuts in a collectivist nightmare of special interest groups with an agenda of little or no importance to the average American. Among these special interest groups are corporations, unions, social groups, religious groups, the NRA, the MIC, the fossil fuel industry, environmentalsts, universities, the AMA, insurance industry, Wall St. the pharmaceutical industry, and the Israel lobby. https://disobedientmedia.com/2017/10/brockbuster-is-the-media-matters-c…https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Brockhttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_for_Responsibility_and_Ethics_…

Here is how to bet on the next financial crisis: buy Golden Sacks. They.Never.Lose.The way to get rich or legally rob a bank, is to find a bank you HATE, and buy it. Don't hate the player, hate the game, sigh.

I already hedged for the financial crisis and did not need Goldman or any of em to do it.The next financial crisis will take Goldman with it. Ask Lehman Bros how the business goes........ Ooops, no one to ask.

Rilly??G/S NEVER can be a Lehman.They own just about everything, control the United States, and other nations thru their financial connections, and are run by jews in armor plated companies that are innoculated, completely immune to the vagaries of markets.When all else fails, they just text J Yell for their bonuses and bailouts, and NO ONE can stop them.I'm surprised their stock price isn't on a level with Amazon.

The Goldman Sachs who were also fucked, unless Buffett bank rolled them? Fukc this revisionist and selective memory shit, GS and the rest were as close to extinction as all of them, without Hank Paulson’s gift aid of TARP and QE to infinity, they were history.